Nissan will put a pure EV on the road in the U.S. and Japan in 2010 in small volumes. In the case of the U.S., the single model will initially be sold only in California. By 2012, he says Nissan EVs will be volume vehicles—multiple models sold in large numbers throughout North America and the rest of the world.

So, looks like the change is in terms of rollout is more areas - and to individuals instead of just fleets.

Even as Nissan shuttered factories in 1999, it continued battery work. In 2006, Ghosn overruled Nissan’s researchers and approved high-volume EV manufacturing.

“The engineers will always tell you, ‘Wait a little more,’ and if you keep playing this game, you never launch any product,” he says.

By the time Ghosn attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2007, he was a full-blown EV booster.

He met Shimon Peres, the Israeli vice prime minister who’d become an EV advocate because of his country’s limited oil. Peres brought Shai Agassi, the Israeli-born founder of Better Place, a Palo Alto, California, company that builds and operates networks of recharging stations, to a meeting at Peres’s hotel.

‘I’ve Got Your Car’

As the two pitched EVs, Ghosn said he didn’t need to hear it.

“I’ve got your car,” Ghosn said, Agassi recalls. “Let’s do it.” Peres, who is now Israel’s president, declined to comment for this story.